This post is part of The Datamation Guide to Human Resources Records.
Taking on new employees in any industry is a huge undertaking. An immense amount of paperwork is needed to comply with industry and governmental regulations, which means that for each employee, that paperwork needs to be printed, filled out, and collected. Between collecting this information and entering it into your company filing system, you’re talking about several days or often weeks before all of this processing is done, and this doesn’t include fixing the mistakes that come with manual onboarding and processing.
As your company grows, which each employee comes a new round of paperwork to be completed. Depending on your industry, some of the paperwork includes
● W-4 and I-9 forms
● Direct Deposit and other banking information
● Benefits
● Expectations (job letter and description for reference)
● Emergency contact information
● The employee handbook
● Company policies
The amount of paper and forms varies between companies and industries, but regardless, it takes time and effort for the employee to fill out the paperwork, get it back to your department, and then have your staff manually enter all of that information.
Unfortunately, when humans enter information manually, there are bound to be a few mistakes. Those mistakes, small as they may be, take time and often money to fix. What may have taken days or week in the first place, could take up to double that time in order to fix those mistakes.
How can your company avoid all of this processing trouble?
When you scan your documents and place them into an automated workflow, the process becomes much quicker. Rather than taking days or weeks to complete, employees can fill out their information on an E-form, which takes this information electronically and immediately integrates it into the workflow. This way, the middleman (paper processing) is eliminated completely. This also means that the information doesn’t have to be re-entered into the system manually, eliminating human error as well.
With an automated workflow, all of the employee information can be quickly integrated into the system in a logical order, and can go to the correct person for approval. Having to pass forms from desk to desk may lead to those forms getting lost in the fray, which means that they may have to be filled out yet again and re-filed. Documents in an automated workflow are accessible and easy to pass on to the next step of the process.
A huge amount of work goes into manual onboarding. As an HR department, you already have dozens of tasks that require your immediate attention, but by automating HR onboarding processes, you take a considerable amount of pressure off of your department while still saving time, money, and effort. Call Datamation today to discuss the perfect plan for your company.
